Interview with David Kirsch, principal investigator of the Birth of the Dot Com Era Project, Page 2
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What do you hope to learn/have you learned from the other partners?
We hope to learn from the other partners what it technically means to construct a digital "dark archive." Many nervous entrepreneurs and other keepers of dot-com records will surely ask us what the actual procedure is for operating such a dark archive and what implications it will have on their rights. To answer these legal and policy questions, we will need an understanding of the technical requirements for building and operating the digital dark archive.
I was perusing your Web site and saw that a portion of your project focuses on gathering oral histories. Is it a fair assumption to say that your project melds old and new; the old being oral histories, the new being late 20th century technology as the subject?
Yes, although our definition of "oral history" is a far cry from that in use among traditional oral historians. We tend to refer to it as "online oral history," or "open-ended online surveys." Interested readers can check out www.dotcomarchive.org; there’s a simple "tell us your story" box as well as a link to a longer, more interactive survey instrument. The idea is to allow people to share their experiences without having to wait for an individual historian to conduct an interview.
Can you make any general statements so far about the dot.com era?
Not really; the big questions are still too hard to answer. With Brent Goldfarb, a colleague here at the University of Maryland, I have looked at firm-survival data. So far, it appears that the survival rate of Dot Com Era firms is actually higher than that among new firms in other new industries. That came as quite a surprise to us. I'm sure we'll have other surprises as we move forward.
What are the barriers to collecting this information?
- Where to look for information? Dot-com companies did not leave much trace. Would it be difficult to locate the information (outside of the legal records), even if it did exist? We believe that substantial amounts of information were probably destroyed (see answer to question below).
- Some people are reluctant to share because of the embarrassment of failure. Most come around after speaking with us, but part of the problem is that we can't talk to everyone. Materials and perspectives have to arrive on their own.
- Significant rights restrictions. Attorney-client confidentiality and contractual nondisclosure provisions all protect the information we want.
- The information we want is also woven together with information outside our collecting guidelines, and extreme care must be taken to separate them, as the extraneous information is even more burdened by ongoing rights.
Can you make any statements about information you would like to have for your project that may no longer be retrievable? Or that may not be retrievable because of barriers such as copyright?
- Information deleted pursuant to records retention policies. This is a huge problem.
- Work done by dead dot-coms (outside of their legal records), which management did not perceive to be of historical value, was destroyed.
What types of work are your partners doing?
Gallivan, Gallivan & O'Melia is working to understand the complex structure of the data as it was preserved. In this task, we are also consulting with former employees responsible for database management and other experts associated with Brobeck’s IT department. Gallivan is also analyzing the cost that would be associated with a very limited, dark, bit-level preservation of the data.
What will be the barriers to making this material accessible?
We could make a substantial list of restrictions that would make the material inaccessible. All these restrictions would relate to the manner and context in which the materials were produced. The basic issue of copyright is always present, but we are also confronted with the expectation of confidentiality accompanying the attorney-client relationship, the trade secret protections that may be present in business documents of ongoing value, and the ethical and legal privacy protections governing information collected about employees.
In addition to the presence of these numerous rights, we must also contend with the fundamental difficulty of locating the appropriate rightsholders. Many of these issues could be dealt with by a simple waiver, but the more pressing problem will be finding someone with the authority to sign such a waiver in the first place.
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